Only One Person Said Yes to Jim Clark, and He Wrecked His New Car That Night
At the peak of his fame, Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark could convince only one young programmer to join him, and the night ended with a wrecked car and a three mile walk home.
David Senra · Marc Andreessen, co-founder of a16z & NetscapeTwelve people sat around a table at Jim Clark's favorite Italian restaurant in Palo Alto, listening to the most famous founder in Silicon Valley pitch them on his next company. Eleven said no. The one who said yes was 22 years old, had just finished college, and was quietly getting drunk.
Clark, a computer science PhD who had invented interactive three dimensional graphics and founded Silicon Graphics, was at the peak of his fame. From about 1987 to 1994, Silicon Graphics was the place in the Valley where the smartest people wanted to work, the equivalent of Google or OpenAI today. Its machines had just made possible the breakthrough effects in Jurassic Park and Terminator 2, and actual Silicon Graphics computers appeared on screen in Jurassic Park.
That dinner in 1994 became the start of Netscape, the company Clark and Marc Andreessen, the young programmer who built the Mosaic web browser, founded together. Clark had tried to recruit about 100 people to the idea, and Andreessen later recalled that only two or three followed through.
Andreessen remembers the dinner for two reasons. One was that, out of everyone at the table, he alone agreed to join. The other was that it was the first time in his life he drank red wine.
He kept sipping to figure out whether he liked it, with no sense of how to calibrate it, and did not realize he was getting completely hammered. He left thinking this was amazing and they were going to do this, then walked to his brand new car, the first new car he had ever owned, in a parking garage across the street.
He pulled out and ripped the entire front end off the car, leaving metal hanging and screaming on the ground. He parked it, got out, and walked the three miles home at about 11 o'clock at night. He was 22, full of red wine, and pretty sure of one thing. He probably would not mention the car to Jim.
Questions people ask
Why did so many people turn Jim Clark down?
He was under a non solicitation agreement with Silicon Graphics, so he could not simply bring his old team with him and had to find new collaborators from the broader technical community. Even with fame comparable to a Zuckerberg or Elon Musk at the time, leaving a secure job for an unformed idea was a hard sell, and most candidates stayed where they were.
What did Clark and Andreessen actually build together?
After ruling out a new graphics chip because it would compete directly with Silicon Graphics, and an early version of interactive television because it was too expensive, they settled on the web. Andreessen had built Mosaic, the first widely used browser with graphics and point and click, and commercial licensing requests convinced them there was a business in browsers and server software. That business became Netscape.
What happened to Silicon Graphics?
It was eclipsed in the 1990s as the $50,000 workstation business Clark had predicted would collapse onto a $300 chip came true. That shift was captured by Nvidia, which is fundamentally built on Clark's ideas about interactive 3D graphics, while Silicon Graphics faded away.